Experiment Perilous (1944)
Nov. 8th, 2009 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The main benefit of the decision to switch the period to 1903, suggested though not stated by Fellows's description of Allida as "a cloistered and frustrated orchid," is the ability to tap into the subtext of Victorianism. The change strengthens the sexual motifs of the story. Nick becomes the arch-Victorian bourgeios, obsessed with the constant danger of his wife's sexuality and driven to kill in an effort to control it. The Bederaux family is a classic Victorian family with a dark tragic past (the suicide of Nick's father), an aunt who must be locked away for a long period, and a neurotic child.
-- Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur - The Cinema of Nightfall
I've written before about Jacques Tourneur, who is one of my favorite Hollywood directors of the classical era, especially for I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Canyon Passage (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and Night of the Demon (1957). He's relatively obscure (although with many champions, ranging from Kim Newman to Martin Scorsese), so it hasn't been easy to see a lot of his films. Now the Warner Archive, which is slowly making the entire Warner catalogue (including the RKO films they own) available as POD DVD-Rs, has put out a couple of Tourneur films I've been dying to see. Experiment Perilous is the first one I picked up.
This is a gothic romance, woman-in-peril film of a type that Hollywood became fascinated with in the '40s, perhaps most famously in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Cukor's Gaslight (also 1944). Tourneur had just made his name on three gothic horror thrillers produced by Val Lewton at RKO, so this was a natural step for him. To the extent that it is also a story of an overly-sophisticated European wrestling with a down-to-earth American over a beautiful innocent, the French Tourneur brings a complex, self-effacing perspective.
There's a lot going on in the story. As so often in this era of Hollywood, the film has a dense, novelistic feel. (It was based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter.) Tourneur is also an elliptical director who leaves out explanations or proffers conflicting ones. As in his famous film noir, Out of the Past, the narrative is twistingly recomplicated, with historical flashbacks thrown on expository lumps leavened with psychological and philosophical analysis and speculation. Above all, Tourneur was a supreme visual artist, and he creates amazingly textured shots that convey a sense of elaborate, nested spatial, ideological, and social relationships.
The Thomas Elsaesser essay I linked to yesterday does a nice (if academically Freudian) job of delineating the sexual, libidinal struggle at the heart of the movie. It's love and death all the way, baby, and it's as much the death of the male ego as anything else, thus something of a reversal of Tourneur's The Cat People (1942). So it's interesting that after two viewings, the movie it makes me think of most is Last Year at Marienbad. Partly it's the dark, sumptuous, heavy, suffocating, endlessly-articulated decor of the bourgeois mansion where the struggle takes place, but it's also the schematic three-body problem of the threatening husband, the petrified wife, and her pensive, narrating lover(s).
It must also be said that I have just acquired the ability to make my own screen caps, so I'm having to fight the impulse to drown this post in images. Perhaps I have failed to fight it! There are so many arresting images in the film, so many doppelgangers in the form of reflections, sculptures, or manikins. The libidinal struggle is also a struggle over representation. Another similarity with Marienbad is that one of the battles is the battle to establish a narrative. Who gets to tell the story? Who gets to direct? Does anyone actually win such a battle? The happy ending of this movie says yes, at least for today. Yet the screen is haunted with beautiful second thoughts.
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Date: 2009-11-08 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-08 09:29 pm (UTC)Not that everything he made is worth seeing. He made a couple of films at AIP at the end of his career that are pretty much just plain terrible. On the other hand, he also did an episode of Twilight Zone called "Night Call" that I just saw that is utterly terrific.
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Date: 2009-11-09 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 05:16 pm (UTC)I love Night of the Demon, which is visually amazing and full of truly unearthly and mysterious moments. There's a level at which I don't care about the stories in his movies. What I love is the visual beauty and mysterious atmosphere, the sense of hidden depths. This quote from Martin Scorsese always seems appropriate: "Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is 'established,' setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his films boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadow, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment -- the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different from other films."
I just love the way that the gorgon is staring at Hunt Bailey in the top screen cap. All of that is happening non-verbally, and you have to know what a gorgon is to understand it, but just visually there's something eerie about it.
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Date: 2009-11-11 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-11 06:00 pm (UTC)As for Night of the Demon, I'm hooked from the very first shot of the lonely car driving through the foggy night forest. The scenes you mention are great, too, as is the one where Andrews is walking down a hotel corridor and becomes strangely disoriented.
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Date: 2009-11-08 09:26 pm (UTC)Also, as Ron says, your comments make me want to see the film. I also think your comments are growing deeper as you gain practice in articulating them and see movies.
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Date: 2009-11-08 09:39 pm (UTC)